An indulgent valentines day
Trip Start
Aug 15, 2006
1
122
155
Trip End
May 27, 2008
Trat,
Thailand
Thursday, February 14, 2008
I tried to explain couchsurfing to him since he wanted to improve his English and had been such a great host but he didn't understand so I showed him the website, e-mailed someone from the Bangkok group that spoke English and Thai and asked them to explain it to him some other time.
Eed drove us out to the town of Samut Songkhran with the idea of visiting the famous floating markets but they were closed due to a public holiday I think. We then went into the temple of Rama II (a former King) which was pretty spectacular. Lots of wooden buildings set amidst lush manicured gardens and a lake. We then went off to something called 'Unseen in Thailand' which was another temple and very busy with Thai tourists. I understood that it had something to do with a former war and there were lots of plastic figures of men fighting.
We then politely explained to Eed that we had to get to Bangkok that afternoon to get a bus to Trat. He was devastated we had to leave him so soon when he had so much to show us. He insisted we get the overnight bus at 10pm which we explained was too late and we really had to go. Eventualy he offered to drive us to Bangkok so we could get the bus from there. Un fortunately along the way he had to fill up with fuel and they wouldn't take his credit card as it was maxed out so he had to call his wife, she had to leave work and pay some money to the bank so we could pay for the fuel and leave. By the time we got into Bangkok it was rush hour and poor Eed was pretty frantic with all the traffic. He dropped us off at a monorail station so we could get that to the bus depot and we gave him our dictionary as a gift so he could improve his English. We also tried to give him 200baht towards the fuel and yet again managed to offend him-we were his guests and he didn't want any money from us. Again, this would be acceptable in our culture but here in Thailand people are different.
We dashed onto the train and just managed to make the bus to Trat. We checked into a place called 'Guy's guesthouse' (not the best but had sounded OK in the LP-why are we still trusting that you ask?) and went to check out a restaurant called 'Cosy Corner' as it sounded OK in the book. It was OK food but didn't seem to have the useful backpacker information and 'helpful staff' we'd read about (we later realised the book was talking about 'Cool Corner' not 'Cosy Corner' restaurant so they were obviously running off their back of success).
Today we moved to anoher place caled NP Guesthouse which had a much nicer bed and we got an en-suite for the same price as Guy's-bargain. The lady who ran the place was much friendlier too. We checked out the town and bought lots of chocolate and had a massage. I found this great market stall that sold hot sweet waffles for about 20p each and we munched on a lot of those this afternoon. Tonight we decided to explore outside of the main town for somewhere to eat and came across this restaurant packed full of locals (we'd forgotten it was Valentine's!) and every table had some kind of DIY BBQ on hot coals with tasty looking meat and veg so we enquired how much and it was a bargain price and we took the risk. It paid off as we had a heap of food and a lot of fun cooking it - we even got a free coconut flavoured jelly desert with it being Valentine's night. I have to say it was probably the best meal I've had on Valentine's! (yes I have had useless boyfriends ;-) )
Tomorrow we have to work out how to get to the boat to take us to Ko Kood. Travel is so complicated when you're not fluent in the local dialect and everyone wants as much cash as they can get out of you!
